Alternately, get me one of those NXT shirts people are always wearing. How do you even get one of those?

– Happy (upcoming) holidays, everybody. The NXT column will be on hiatus for a week, because next Wednesday is Christmas, but it’ll be back the week after that. Yes, I will try to find a way to work a Cesaro vs. Regal review into that column anyway.

As a recently returned to the fold ROH fan, and a guy who almost cried in Providence at how amazing Eddie Edwards/Biff Busick Iron Man Match was I was super excited for the American Pitbulls but oh man that entire paragraph made me LOLZ

I’m also exceited for the future! but this was one of my least favourite NXT episodes in a long time, really. (which only speaks for how good NXT was most of the time!)

it’s the 200th episode! and I had HIGH hopes! and almost no one match was important and only the tag match was exciting (not the american pitbulls one).

the divas match felt a little slow and never really picked up to me. shouldn’t they have saved natalya’s appearances for AFTER the 200th episode and used the past few weeks to build paige/emma for THIS WEEK? of course it’s still good for the future. but for this one week, that didn’t satisfy me.

and that american pitbulls match had like only one really good looking move in rick victor’s secretly-better-than-daniel-bryan vicious running knee!

thank god for enzo amore, big cass and aiden english’s segment. loved hhh’s promo and the old NXT videos. and tyler breeze’s bummed face was the most adorable! he STAYED DOWN the whole time!!!

I just started watching ROH like a month ago. the in-ring product is enjoyable at least.

I was watching ROH’s final battle PPV (where that accident happened) earlier today, actually! and they made a video package that expressed why kevin steen piledriving maria kanellis was totally deserving: [www.youtube.com]

he didn’t do it “just because she was a woman. there were many reasons. she even slapped him again for no reason before he did that, and almost ruined his match, too.

same thing with another match AT THE SAME NIGHT where another guy kneed a girl named scarlett in the face when she refused to stop interfering in his match and started attacking him. he also left another girl and dropped her on his knees hard for doing the same. the story as I understood was that those two girls (and another 3rd manager, too) were helping his opponet retain his title for many months and kept interfering in his match, and that the guy was also some kind of a psychopath. so, he attacked them all to be able to win.

3 women were harmed at the first ROH PPV I see. but seriously, they introduced a lot of convincing reasons for it.

^That whole video package was to set up Maria getting pile-driven to the Christian interpretation of hell.

Also, Maria is like 5’4, 5’4 and probably about 110-115. Why is this Bennett guy even thinking about piledriving Maria when he’s about a foot taller and 100+ pounds heavier than her. He’d figuratively kill her.

no, not bennett. bennett is her boyfriend. he was piledriven thorugh a chair by kevin steen for the win, and then, steen piledrived maria because she, not only did all that in the video, but kept ruining the match for him.

maria is also a wrestler so she can take it. it wasn’t the same as cena calling eve a hoeski or something. she was indeed evil throughout the fued and got what was coming for her.

On WWE Raw/Smackdown, I find the wrestling to be too conservative and uninspiring (in general terms). So we see too many wrestlers go for chin locks and other rest holds far too often in every match.

ROH has the exact opposite problem. Every move done in an ROH ring seems to be a devastating finisher. Each wrestler in a match takes turns hitting 15 different finishers and then the match just ends. It gets ridiculous after about 5 minutes of this.

We need a happy medium between the two. NXT is almost there, but, it could use having its sliders adjusted a little more to the ROH side.

That’s part of my problem watching ROH. I’ve been training with wrestlers for the last 8 months, and one of the things that’s been hammered home not only by the trainer but by other professionals who stop in is, “don’t trade kill shots.” I supposed adolescent me would’ve loved watching guys kick out of four or five consecutive super kicks, but 33-year-old me is like, “this is surprisingly boring.”

I try to avoid ROH because it every match feels the same. Superkick, then BuckleBomb, next a Spinning Backfist, into a Brainbuster and finally a Frog Splash. That sounds like an awful to finish to match but ROH will probably do it next week.

I watched ROH TV fairly regularly a couple of years ago, but eventually got bored with it and stopped. (I was a huge fan of Jay Lethal and kept wondering why he didn’t get a run as World champion). I haven’t seen the show since… the middle of last year, maybe? The production values were just so terrible, and the iPPV’s so frustrating to order that it made it easy to slip away from keeping up with the product.

With all of that said, my first reaction to that video package was “When did Mike Bennett turn into Aaron Paul?!!?”

In the WWE women are portrayed as weaker than men and need to be protected from them. In ROH they’re just as fair game as any guy if they attack them, try to interfere, cause them to lose a match etc. I can understand and appreciate that some fans get off on it in a “Yeah, teach that bitch some respect!!!” sexist manner but on the other hand there’s something to be said for the mindset of “The evil, cheating Maria is an equal target to the evil, cheating Bennet for a Steen piledriver”. It’s a kind of fucked-up equality.

“It was like on an 80s cartoon where a character is in a grocery store and they approach a bunch of tomatoes, and all the tomatoes are blurry and faded into the background except for one RED ASS TOMATO right in the middle, so you know that’s the one the character’s interacting with. Tyler Breeze was the tomato you noticed.” – Amazing. I want to frame this.

It’s a thing from the days when they’d draw cartoons by hand, have a static background, and then layers of things that moved on top. The tomato you notice is on a different layer, on top of the background, so it sticks out. (The tomato is just an example. I always noticed it when it was a door.)

1) Oh my Gawd, that elf picture of Emma and Paige is the best both have looked (which is impressive because both are beautiful). Please keep their hair/makeup like the instagram picture.

2) I still think each match should be longer than the time currently allocated. They could have easily cut the Emma/Natty segment as it seemed more like filler than anything.

3) I’d like to see more of the American Pitbulls. Maybe when they are signed, they can change their names back to the American Wolves and go by their more recognized names. Though I find it interesting they have a subtle nod to Dynamite Kid. Or is that a co-incidence?

Either way, I’m glad they didn’t wrestle an ROH match where powerbombs are used as often as the WWE wrestlers use chin locks.

4) A year and a half ago I was ready/thrilled to see Paige become the next big thing. Since then, I feel like she’s regressed. Last night she looked kind of stiff and awkward. At least The BFF’s are around to make my heart smile

5) While I love Bo Dallas’ character, the dude needs to have better wrestling moves. I find him boring in the ring. His moveset seems so bland.

6) Whomever is the piece of shit who has “Fire this person” on their sign, I hope they go away and never come back. I’ve noticed this person two episodes in a row and it’s really pissing me off. Especially when he held it up when Sasha Banks entered the ring.

totally agreed with you on #6! he held it in front of almost EVERYBODY except for sami zayn! leo kruger, bo dallas and even alexander rusev got it flashed behind them! (which made me remember. no best/worst for the kofi kingston/lana segment, brandon? ok, ok. leave it for the week after next week when the match actually happens.

Do I even want to know what the ‘ratchet’ chants mean? And if it’s something racist, well…perhaps I’m glad I’m ignorant about that sort of thing. It’s a dumb chant, all in all, because it doesn’t MEAN anything.

I really do think NXT needs to change/shift the crowd a little. ANY of the women in developmental getting a “Fire This Person” chant/sign is insane. (Try cleaning up the roster on RAW – including a certain pair of twins, Tamina and Aksana – first) The crowd has simply gotten too smarky for its own good. We all can appreciate a hot, hot crowd every week…but not like this.

(warning: minor spoilers (just mentioning the main event match, but not the results))

the trainees and the trainers have all been tweeting about this for the last week or so. asking everyone to come and say goodbye for the final time. it’s probably what triple h meant in his opening promo in this episode.

I look closely in the first 5-10 seconds she enters with Fandango and smile happily, but then, I don’t keep thinking about it. In NXT, when she whips her hair on the top turnbuckle, well, Alex* explained how I feel. but again, the feeling isn’t there the whole time, and that makes me furious when jerry lawler just KEEPS ONLY FOCUSING ON HER AND TALKING ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.

I think it’s because beauty and sexiness are definetely not the only thing summer got, nor even her best thing! that’s how good she is at her job.

Catching up on my darker period of wrestling, it seems like the hate for HHH, Cena, and Orton (to a lesser extent) comes from the period where it was just those 3 guys trading the WWE title back in forth with a little Edge, Batista, Hardy, and Punk thrown in. I know HHH has done worse (the Wrestlemania feuds with Booker, Jericho, and Orton & being a buzz kill)

Welp, as I’ve stated in the current threads, I’ve been catching up on NXT (I’m very late to the party) and just watched this episode. This show is amazing every week, and people say it only gets BETTER, which I can hardly believe. The backstage bit with Enzo, Big Cass, and Aiden English had me legit laughing out loud, especially the theater elective line. I can’t explain how excited I am to hear Big Cass sing. If anyone reads this, I’m catching up, and I can’t wait to meet you guys in 2015.